Point Blank

Plot

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Review

John Boorman's Point Blank was one of the most interesting and quietly influential films of late 1960s American cinema. Unashamedly violent, void of morality, and full of "European" experimentation, the film ignored the conventions of typical Hollywood crime thrillers. Compared to the stark grimness of typical crime movies, Point Blank was downright phantasmagoric in its narrative structure, camera placement, color schemes, and sounds. Released just three weeks after the similarly revolutionary Bonnie and Clyde, the film was not an immediate hit with audiences; even though star Lee Marvin was coming off the successful The Dirty Dozen, the film got swept up in the "violence-in-movies" controversy. Where Warren Beatty's Clyde and Faye Dunaway's Bonnie were sympathetic and glamorous, Marvin seemed capable of "bashing somebody's brains out," to paraphrase his famous line from The Dirty Dozen. But the actor's icy menace and Boorman's artistic pretensions have gone on to influence filmmakers to come, most notably Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, and Quentin Tarantino. ~ Brendon Hanley, Rovi

Cast

• Lee Marvin - Walker
• Angie Dickinson - Chris
• Keenan Wynn - Fairfax
• Carroll O'Connor - Brewster
• John Vernon - Mal Reese

Sharon Acker - Lynne; Michael Strong - Stegman; Lloyd Bochner - Frederick Carter; James B. Sikking - Hired Gun; Sandra Warner - Waitress; Roberta Haynes - Mrs. Carter; Kathleen Freeman - 1st Citizen; Victor Creatore - Carter's Man; Lawrence Hauben - Car Salesman; Susan Holloway - Customer; Sid Haig - Guard; Michael Patrick Bell - Penthouse Lobby Guard; Priscilla Boyd - Receptionist; Ron Walters - Roommates; Rico Cattani - Guard; Bill Hickman - Guard; Chuck Hicks - Guard; Karen Lee - Waitress; Joseph Mell - Man; Felix Silla - Bellhop; Ted White - Football Player; Carey Foster - Dancer; Lou Whitehill - Policeman

Credit

George W. Davis - Art Director, Albert Brenner - Art Director, Margo Weintz - Costume Designer, Al Jennings - First Assistant Director, John Boorman - Director, Henry Berman - Editor, Johnny Mandel - Composer (Music Score), Stu Gardner - Songwriter, William J. Tuttle - Makeup, John Truwe - Makeup, Philip H. Lathrop - Cinematographer, Judd Bernard - Producer, Robert Chartoff - Producer, Keogh Gleason - Set Designer, Henry W. Grace - Set Designer, J. McMillan Johnson - Special Effects, Virgil Beck - Special Effects, Franklin E. Milton - Sound/Sound Designer, David Newhouse - Screenwriter, Alexander Jacobs - Screenwriter, Rafe Newhouse - Screenwriter, Richard Stark - Book Author

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